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      Trump, Vance y sus aliados insultan a las mujeres al final de la contienda electoral

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      Trump ha utilizado un lenguaje misógino para referirse a Harris, fomentando un ambiente entre sus aliados y en sus mítines que se regodea en los insultos sexistas.De pie en su mitin final de la campaña de 2024, el expresidente Donald Trump, en los primeros minutos después de la medianoche del día de las elecciones, utilizó un rudo comentario sexista para atacar a la representante Nancy Pelosi, la expresidenta de la Cámara de Representantes quien es una de sus rivales políticas de larga data.“Es una mala persona”, dijo Trump en el Van Andel Arena de Grand Rapids, Míchigan. “Malvada. Es una malvada, enferma, loca”. Hizo una mueca exagerada, con la boca abierta para llamar la atención sobre la siguiente sílaba: “Pe…”.Luego levantó un dedo dramáticamente, fingiendo que se había dado cuenta. “Oh, no”, dijo. Mientras miles de personas se echaban a reír, Trump pronunció la palabra por el micrófono. “Empieza por P, pero no la diré”, añadió Trump. “Quiero decirla”.Mientras la multitud rugía aún más fuerte, algunos de los asistentes empezaron a suministrar la palabra que él apenas había omitido, gritando: “¡Perra!”.En los últimos días de la contienda, Trump ha hecho llamamientos directos a las mujeres mientras hace frente a una brecha de género en las encuestas que les ha preocupado a él y a su equipo. Ha evitado mencionar su papel en el nombramiento de los jueces de la Corte Suprema que anularon el derecho constitucional al aborto, una cuestión que, según las encuestas, es una de las principales preocupaciones de las votantes femeninas.Pero, al mismo tiempo, Trump ha utilizado un lenguaje misógino para referirse a la vicepresidenta Kamala Harris y ha fomentado un ambiente en sus mítines en el que oradores y asistentes se sienten cómodos profiriendo el tipo de insultos de género que, en otra época política, habría sido impensable decir en público.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Here is what my final polling data says about the US presidential election | John Zogby

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      The final six public polls that have been released pretty much tell the same story as each other and the previous polls in October. The race to become the 47th president of the United States is on a razor-thin margin. Three of those last six polls were actual ties; one has Kamala Harris ahead by three points; the others have Donald Trump up by one point and two points.My own firm, John Zogby Strategies, just released a final survey for our clients of 1,005 decided voters nationwide showing Harris leading with 49.3% of the vote and Trump polling at 45.6% of the vote – a margin, or difference, of 3.7 percentage points.That is close, and even more of a squeeze because of the current relationship of the popular vote to the electoral college. Harris is certain to receive millions of “excess” votes in large states such as California, New York, Illinois and Massachusetts which will beef up her total popular vote nationwide but not do anything for her in key battleground states such as Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – all of which are too close to call as we approach election day.Harris’s lead in the John Zogby Strategies poll is within the margin-of-sampling error, but it reveals some dynamics that portend changing demographic support for both the Democratic and Republican parties. These are some findings and possible trend lines that not only explain what may happen once the votes are counted, but also suggest possibly significant realignments within both parties.For one, Harris appears to have underperformed with 18- to 29-year-olds nationally; in contrast Trump is leading among them, capturing 47% of the vote, while Harris polls at 45%. Ironically, in our poll, she did best among those over 65 with a 58%-39% margin. Those age cohorts usually produce opposite results, with older voters tending to be more conservative. The gen Z and millennial voters also revealed a huge “gender gap” of well over 60 points between men and women.There is also a substantial “marriage gap”: Trump won married voters by four points – not as big as in 2020 (seven points), but Harris won among non-married people by eight points (51%-43%), not as much as Joe Biden’s 18-point victory, but still enough to see that marital status is a key to how people vote. Notably, married women, who usually tend to be on the conservative side, chose Harris in our poll.Harris leads among voters who identify as independents by 13 points (51% of independents polled say they will vote for her, compared with just 38% saying they will vote for Trump), about the same as Biden, who received 54% of independent votes, compared with Trump getting 41% of their vote in 2020.The candidates chose messages and styles that aimed at different groups of voters. Trump stayed with his dark and isolationist theme, focusing on rallying his base first, then hoping to pick up more moderate independents who feel that the Biden-Harris team have led the US down the wrong path. Harris opted for directing her campaign with an appeal to those who were tired of Trump’s negativity and, at times, bizarre behavior. Her approach appears to have paid off, as she leads with 56% of self-described moderate voters. That puts her 19 points ahead with moderates than Trump, who polls at 37. This was a group that Biden won by 30 points last time.Harris did, as was suggested throughout the year’s polling, underperform in our poll among Black voters (73% said they would vote for her, and 19% said Trump) and Hispanic voters (Trump polls at 48% with Hispanic voters, Harris at 44%), but she is doing much better among white voters – down by only five (she polls at 46% and Trump polls at 51%), compared with Trump’s 17-point victory in 2020, where 58% voted for him and 41% voted for Biden.Harris is down considerably among Catholics (43% back her, compared with 55% backing Trump) and Protestants (36% back her, compared with 59% backing Trump), but scores well among those with no religious affiliation and with atheists. Democrats have been getting 30% or so of born-again evangelical voters in recent elections, but Harris only shows 24% in our poll.Harris not only leads in cities (53% of city-dwellers back her, compared with 43% backing Trump) but also in the suburbs (she was backed by 50% of the suburban voters polled, compared with 44% backing Trump) – the latter powered by a solid performance among suburban women. Biden won both in 2020: he won 60% of votes in cities (while Trump only got 38% of the vote in cities), but barely scraped by in suburbs, where only 50% voted for him, compared with 48% voting for Trump.There is a wide “education gap” in US politics. Harris has the backing of 57% of those with college degrees, compared with 39% for Trump. In 2020, Biden won the same group by 12 points (he received 55% of their vote, while Trump received 43%). Trump leads among those without degrees (50% of voters without college degrees back him, compared with 44% backing Harris). That was 50% for Biden and 48% for Trump last time.The gender gap propels Harris’s lead, with 49% of Trump voters being men versus 43% of Harris voters being men. (In 2020, 45% of Trump voters were men, while 53% of Biden voters were men.) Women back Harris by 12 points, with 55% of women supporting her to 43% supporting Trump (Biden won 57% of women, while Trump only received 42% of the women’s vote). There is in our poll an 18-point gender point gap.All of these “gaps” suggest a very real issues gap between Harris and Trump supporters. For those selecting Harris, the top issues are abortion (45%), the economy/Inflation (39%), democracy (37%) and climate change (19%). For those backing Trump, the top are the economy/inflation (68%), immigration (61%), keeping the US out of war (15%) and crime (14%). Two different worlds.Some key states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, both hotly contested, will not finish counting ballots until later in the week, and other states likely to be very close will have automatic recounts. It is not likely that we will know who won for a while. Our poll is thus far the only one that polled through Sunday 3 November; we left the lights on longer to try to capture late-breaking trends.

      John Zogby is senior partner at the polling firm of John Zogby Strategies and is author of Beyond the Horse Race: How to Read the Polls and Why We Should More

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      in US Politics

      History in the making: is the US finally about to elect its first female president?

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      “This is monumental,” said 19-year-old Kai Carter as she stood in line behind the White House where Kamala Harris was about to take the stage a week before the 5 November election.Carter was ecstatic at the prospect of Harris making history as the first Black female president of the United States. She attended the event with a group of fellow students from Howard University, the historically Black college in Washington DC, which is also the vice-president’s alma mater.Born in the United States of an Indian mother and Jamaican father, Harris, the first female vice-president, is also potentially on the verge of becoming the first Asian American president, as well the country’s first female president. Yet she is not making a big deal about it.In her closing argument in Washington DC before one of the most consequential elections in the country’s history, Harris did not refer to her gender or her race or how she may be breaking a glass ceiling. It’s not something she brings up often on the campaign trail, choosing instead to focus on her middle-class upbringing and how she hopes to be a president for “all Americans”.Her central message that night was about Donald Trump as a threat to democracy. “This election is more than a choice between two parties and two different candidates. It is a choice about whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American. Or one ruled by chaos and division.”Unlike Hillary Clinton, who made gender a central part of her 2016 run for office, at a time of historic polarization Harris chose to focus on issues over identity. That is also how she chose to run her unusually short campaign of 13 weeks after an ageing Biden finally passed her the mantle on 21 July.Laurie Pohutsky, a Democratic state representative in Michigan, decided to run in 2018 after witnessing Trump’s misogynistic campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Since then, she has introduced two key pieces of state legislation that lifted restrictions on abortion. In a phone interview from the swing state governed by the Democrat Gretchen Whitmer, she said: “You know, we weren’t elected because we were women. And I think that when we frame it that way, we do a disservice to ourselves.”She said she agreed with Harris’s choice not to focus on gender: “While it’s historic, it’s not what would make her a good president.”“We’re long overdue for a female president,” she added. “But that’s not why I think people are voting for her. They’re voting for her because of her record and the work that she’s done and the things that she believes, versus what we know Donald Trump believes.”Identity politicsIn the face of misogyny and racism, it is Harris’s detractors who have attempted to use her identity against her. Republicans regularly mispronounce her name or call her a “DEI hire”.At the beginning of her campaign, Trump sought to steer the conversation towards race in an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists, questioning whether Harris is indeed Black. Many recognize these personal attacks as Trump’s hallmark. Their purpose is to undermine debate, take his opponent off script, stoke division and ultimately attract media attention.Christina Reynolds, senior vice-president for communications for Emily’s List, a political action committee that backs pro-choice Democratic female candidates, including Harris, explains that women are often the butt of personal attacks whereas men are attacked for their policies. Reynolds has witnessed this first-hand after working on five presidential campaigns, including Hillary Clinton’s.This is just one example of the double standards women and particularly women of color face to get to the top. Another is the pressure on women to be both likable and competent, whereas a man can be one or the other. Research by UC Berkeley’s Hass School of Business also shows that women in positions of power lose likability. This is particularly true of successful middle-aged women.In 2016, Trump accused Clinton of being a “nasty woman” while male pundits told her to “smile” more. When Harris, a former prosecutor, successfully grilled Brett Kavanaugh in his confirmation hearing for the supreme court, Trump accused her too of being “nasty”.A champion of women’s rightsDespite Harris’s attempts to detract attention from her gender and race, she has campaigned heavily on the issue of women’s rights. “She may not frame things in terms of her gender, but the first president or vice-president to invite abortion providers to the White House and to visit an abortion provider – both of those firsts were Kamala Harris,” Reynolds said.The overturning of Roe v Wade by three Trump-appointed supreme court justices in 2022 placed women’s rights at the forefront of voters’ concerns. The right to abortion was a hard-fought battle that was won in 1973. A poll from May 2024 from the nonpartisan Pew Research Center suggested that 63% of Americans believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases.In perhaps one of the most moving moments of the Democratic national convention, three women told their harrowing personal stories of being denied medical care in states where abortions are restricted.At the closing rally in Washington DC, Harris suggested Trump could take things even further: “He would ban abortion nationwide, restrict access to birth control and put IVF at risk and force states to monitor women’s pregnancies,” she said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarris has also proposed policies to appeal to people – especially women – who need to care for parents and young children at the same time, known as the sandwich generation. She talks about how she had to care for her mother before she died of cancer in 2009, and she has talked about her plan to have Medicare pay for home healthcare.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage:

      When do polls close?

      Trump v Harris on key issues

      What’s at stake and what else to know
      Signs of progressHarris is running for office in a divided country, with Trump threatening violence against his political opponents. “On day one, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list. When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list,” she said in DC last week to a crowd of more than 75,000 people.And while in her closing argument the Democratic nominee made clear that she pledged to be a “president for all Americans” and “to always put country above party and above self”, at the same time Reynolds noted that “she has taken the communities that she has been a part of” and ensured that they “have a voice” and “that they are included in conversations”.As Americans watched Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House and Harris as vice-president sitting behind Biden as he gave his first address to Congress in April 2021, they were reminded of how women are increasingly occupying positions of power. The numbers tell a similar story. According to data provided by the Center for American Women and Politics, in 2017 the US had 105 female members of Congress out of 535. Today the number has reached 150, including rising stars such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jasmine Crockett.“We still have a long way to go,” said Reynolds. But people no longer hear the word “candidate” “with the assumption that a candidate is a man”.“And that’s progress,” she added.At Harris’s closing address in Washington DC, Elaine Callahan, a self-described independent voter, felt compelled to back Harris in 2024: “It is historic. Yes!”But as polls show Harris and Trump neck and neck in many swing states, she remembers what happened to Clinton back in 2016 and is prompted to “pray to God there will be a shift”. More

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      in US Politics

      The women ‘cancelling out’ their Trump-loving partners’ votes: ‘No one will ever know’

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      Mackenzie Owens and her boyfriend strut toward the camera like models on a catwalk, posing as she takes a dramatic sip from her Stanley cup. “Just a bf and a gf going to cancel each other’s votes,” reads the caption of their TikTok – the couple, who live in Pennsylvania, support separate candidates this election season.Owens made the TikTok to join in on a trend of women disclosing that they’re voting against their partners’ preferred candidates. In one video, a woman mischievously tucks away a strand of hair as she mails in her ballot, “proudly” cancelling out her boyfriend’s ballot – “because someone paid attention in US History & has to care about keeping the Dept of Education!!!!” In another, a woman dances to Ciara’s Level Up before driving off to “cancel out” her “Trump loving Husband’s vote in a swing state”.View image in fullscreenThe dozens of women participating are, for the most part, Democrats supporting Kamala Harris’s bid, while their male partners are voting for Donald Trump. (Owens did not disclose who she or her boyfriend voted for.) Though their posts provide levity in the final days of an ugly presidential race, they also underscore the pivotal role gender is playing in the election.A late October national poll from USA Today/Suffolk University found that women resoundingly back Harris over Trump, 53% to 36%, a “mirror image” of men’s support for Trump over Harris, 53% to 37%. A September poll from Quinnipiac University similarly found a 26-point gender gap. An unknown – but certainly sizable – number of women are seeing this gender gap in their own relationships.Owens, who is 19, isn’t particularly bothered by her boyfriend’s politics. “Nowadays, people think that you have to have the same political opinions as your partner, because [hyper-partisan politics] is a big problem in society, but I personally think it’s cool to co-exist and learn about the other side, and get different opinions I didn’t think of before,” she said. “But in a way, that’s not socially acceptable.”Meanwhile, liberal TikTokers are weighing in to say they could never date or marry a Trump supporter, given the former president’s sexist remarks about women and his appointment of anti-abortion justices to the supreme court, which resulted in the 2022 reversal of Roe v Wade. “What do you mean you’re on your way to cancel out your husband’s vote?” reads one viral tweet. “You should be on your way to the courthouse. Divorce babe. Divorce.”Harris needs women to turn out on Tuesday, especially those who might take a page from the TikTokers’ playbook and vote differently from the men in their lives. But those posts come from mostly young, liberal women who feel safe publicly disagreeing on candidates. In recent days, Democratic groups have made overtures to Republican women, or women who project conservatism to their friends and family but quietly harbor doubts about Trump.Republican turnout among women – especially white women, who backed Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections – can be partially explained by their husbands, who are seen as wielding influence over the family vote, said strategists and advocates who spoke with the Guardian.“Women often give deference to the presumed expertise of their husbands on politics, and then the men reinforce that presumption and express their intensity and so-called greater expertise,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster. “We try to reinforce to women that you have your own way of doing things, your own point of view, you focus on what’s good for the whole family. Then we emphasize that the vote is private.”That’s a sentiment echoed in a new ad, narrated by Julia Roberts, from the progressive evangelical organization Vote Common Good. In the ad, a woman whose husband appears to be a Trump supporter enters the voting booth to cast her ballot for Harris. “In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want and no one will ever know,” Roberts says in the voiceover.Doug Pagitt, executive director of Vote Common Good, said the group first conceptualized the ad during the 2022 midterms. “We kept hearing from women that they were going to pay an emotional price with their families, friends and church if they didn’t continue to toe the line [and vote for Trump],” Pagitt said.On a campaign stop in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Michelle Obama told swing state voters: “If you are a woman who lives in a household of men that don’t listen to you or value your opinion, just remember that your vote is a private matter.” Liz Cheney, a never-Trump Republican who campaigned alongside Harris in Detroit last week, reminded Republican women that there is no official way to look up how someone voted: “You can vote your conscience and not ever have to say a word to anybody, and there will be millions of Republicans who do that on November 5.”The Lincoln Project, a moderate political action committee, also released a bluntly titled ad, Secret, where two Trump-supporting men assume their wives also back their candidate. However, when the couples get to the polls, one of the women mouths “Kamala” to the other, and after an affirmative nod, both fill in their ballots for the Democrat.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis messaging is stoking anger among conservative personalities, who say it is sexist and retrograde to assume women only vote for Trump to appease their husbands. They also, paradoxically, say this messaging is undermining traditional family values. Charlie Kirk, who last year said the “radical left” was being “run by childless young ladies” on antidepressants, called the ads “the embodiment of the downfall of the American family” on Megyn Kelly’s podcast.The Fox News host Jesse Watters said that if he found out his wife had secretly voted for Harris, “that’s the same thing as having an affair … it violates the sanctity of our marriage”. This, despite the fact that Watters had an affair with his current wife while still married to his first wife.In the final stretch, these complex – and often secretive – relationship dynamics are affecting Democrats’ ground game, said Kelly Dittmar, director of research and scholar at Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics. “You see it in public women’s bathrooms or places where women can be directly appealed to without the barrier of the man in their life. There are stickers or signs that say, ‘Remember, your vote is private,’” she said.Nancy Hirschmann, a political scientist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, added that canvassers for Harris were trained to avoid outing wives who may be registered Democrats to their Republican husbands: “If a man answers the door who’s clearly in favor of Trump, you don’t ask for the woman by name, you ask if there are other voters in the house you can speak to.”View image in fullscreenIt is too early to tell if Republican-coded women may in fact turn out to be secret Harris voters. But back on TikTok, women vocally share their 2024 picks, even if they go against their partner’s choice – or an ex-partner’s choice.Jamisen Casey, a 21-year-old student who goes to school in California but is registered to vote in her home state of Tennessee, took part in the trend, with a twist. “My absentee ballot on its way home to cancel out my ex boyfriend’s vote,” Casey wrote in the caption of a video showing her dancing with the envelope while We Both Reached for the Gun from the musical Chicago plays.“It’s really hard to know that there are men out there who want to vote against reproductive rights, even though they shouldn’t have a say in it at all,” Casey, who voted for Harris, said. She doesn’t think she could date someone who doesn’t share her views again. “As a political science major, I made a decision that I don’t want to put myself in that position.” More

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      in Elections

      How Bad Do You Want It, Ladies?

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      Usually, I get political wisdom from Rahm Emanuel, not his brother Ari.But a quote from Ari, the Hollywood macher, to Puck’s Matthew Belloni about the gender chasm in 2024 caught my eye.“This election is gonna come down to probably 120,000 votes,” Ari said. “You probably have 60 percent of the male vote for Trump, and the female vote is 60-40 for Kamala. It’s a jump ball. We’re gonna find out who wants this more — men or women.”Are we back to the days of Mars versus Venus? Or did we never leave?It is the ultimate battle of the sexes in the most visceral of elections. Who will prevail? The women, especially young women, who are appalled at the cartoonish macho posturing and benighted stances of Donald Trump and his entourage? Or the men, including many young men, union men, Latino and Black men, who are drawn to Trump’s swaggering, bullying and insulting, seeing him as the reeling-backward antidote to shrinking male primacy.Drilling into the primal yearnings of men and women — their priorities, identities, anger and frustration — makes this election even more fraught. When I wrote a book about gender in 2005, I assumed that, a couple of decades later, we’d all be living peacefully on the same planet. But no Cassandra, I. The sexual revolution intensified our muddle, leaving women in a tangle of dependence and independence in the 21st century. The more we imitated men, the more we realized how different we were.Progress zigzags. But it was dispiriting to see the fierce backlash to Geraldine Ferraro, Anita Hill and Hillary Clinton’s co-presidency and candidacy.In Kamala Harris’s case, the backlash is evident even before the election. Surveys reflect the same doubts about a woman in the White House that I saw covering Ferraro in 1984. Many men — and many women — still wonder if women are too emotional to deal with world leaders and lead the military.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A woman says Trump groped her in front of Jeffrey Epstein. Will anyone listen? | Moira Donegan

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      Does sexual assault matter politically? Eight years ago, in October of 2016, many people thought that it did. When the Access Hollywood tape was released on 7 October of that year, and audio blared from every cable news channel in which Donald Trump, attempting to impress the celebrity interviewer Billy Bush, bragged that his stardom meant he could grab women “by the pussy”, the incident was, for a moment at least, widely believed to have ended his presidential bid. The clip sparked outrage, condemnation and calls for Trump to drop out of the race – including from sitting Republican governors, senators and representatives. The Republican National Committee suspended support for Trump’s campaign in response to the tape. His political career was widely assumed to be over.It wasn’t. The allegations of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen other women that were made in the days, weeks and years thereafter – including from reporters, models, yoga instructors, Mar-a-Lago regulars, Miss USA and Miss Teen USA contestants, strangers he sat next to on planes, women who worked for him, entrepreneurs, adult film stars, advice columnists and one woman who had the misfortune of attending a Mother’s Day brunch event at a Trump-owned property – did not, either. For all the seriousness and solemnity with which Republican politicians condemned Trump in the days following the release of the Access Hollywood tape – for all their furrowed brows and reverent declarations that alleged sexual assault is no laughing matter – ultimately, the Republican party establishment lined up behind Trump. So did their voters.It might be a sign of how far we have fallen that the political world, this week, barely seemed to notice when the veteran model Stacey Williams came forward to say she was groped by Trump in 1993, while the pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein – a close friend of Trump’s and Williams’s boyfriend at the time – looked on. Williams’s account mirrors those provided by many of Trump’s other accusers: like them, she seems to have been lewdly groped by Trump, who grabbed her breasts and buttocks in an abrupt and perfunctory fashion. Indeed, what happened to Williams sounds a bit like how Trump himself has described his conduct: “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.”This time, there were no calls for Donald Trump to drop out of the race; no solemn condemnations; no handwringing over whether Trump’s boorishness, his braying entitlement, or his violent and vulgar treatment of women and girls might disqualify him from the power and supposed honor of the position that he’s seeking. No one bothered to point out that someone who assaults women – let alone someone who does so as routinely and prolifically as Trump is said to have done – does not deserve to be the president. Even the Democrats mostly shrugged.Part of this, to be sure, is because hardly anyone is surprised by Trump anymore. There are few minds most Americans will ever know as intimately as we have all been forced to know Trump’s. We know his narcissism, its surprising pettiness; we know his monumental vanity, his cynicism, his relentless dishonesty; we know the uncanny self-awareness of his humor – though it never, ever comes at his own expense – and we know the compass-like constancy of his devotion to his own short-term self-interest.We even know that he was friends with Epstein, whose predations on underage girl children Trump joked about in an interview with New York Magazine in the 90s. We know, already, how he behaves towards women; we have been shown. We’ve learned not only from the more than two dozen women who have told us, not only from the sworn testimony of Stormy Daniels, not even only from the jury’s verdict in the civil suit for rape and assault that was brought against him, successfully, by the writer E Jean Carroll. We know from watching him, as we have been compelled to do, now, for the better part of a decade.What might be more revealing, then, is what the non-response to Stacey Williams’s story tells us about ourselves. In the wake of Donald Trump’s election – and in direct response to the indignity American women faced when a man who bragged about and was alleged to have serially committed sexual assault was elevated to a position of superlative authority – the #MeToo movement faced a mass public reckoning over sexual violence, and its prevalence and impunity in all sectors of American life.Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, two investigative reporters at the New York Times, published their first story about the predations of the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein on 5 October 2017 – just two days shy of the one-year anniversary of the Access Hollywood tape. For a heady moment, powerful men who did the kinds of things Trump has been accused of – and has bragged about doing – were losing their positions of dignity and power as a result. Even Republican politicians were not immune: Roy Moore, a far-right Republican Senate candidate, lost his election in no less a deep-red state than Alabama after nine women accused him of sexual misconduct against them while he was in his 30s and they were in their teens.Many solemn declarations were made then, too: about the long-overdue reckoning, the pain of survivors, the need to reconsider sexual scripts, the eroticization of inequality, and the ways inequality had been weaponized to demean women and keep them from public life. All of this proceeded while Trump sat in the Oval Office. None of it could touch him: everyone presumed he was immune from any accountability for the way he treated women, and he was.Maybe other men are now, too. The #MeToo movement was a large and internally fractious movement, but if it can be said to have had a singular goal, it might have been this: to resolve our culture’s cognitive dissonance about sexual violence. For decades, the world operated on a kind of grim hypocrisy: everyone – from the law to the HR department, from Hollywood to your weekend hobby group – professed to abhor sexual violence, to take it maximally seriously. But, in practice, sexual violence was not taken very seriously at all: the incidents were minimized, the prevalence was shrugged off, the victims were blamed, demonized and smeared as vindictive or hysterical for ever bringing it up.Everyone said they hated sexual violence and that they thought it mattered; most people acted as if they thought it didn’t. The goal of #MeToo could be said to bring actions into line with words: to make people behave as if they thought sexual violence was as wrong as they said it was. Instead, it may have resolved the cognitive dissonance in the other direction: now people admit that they care very little about sexual violence. Their actions, I suppose, finally match their words.Before the Guardian broke Williams’s story, there was a flutter of rumors about an impending accusation on social media. These were flamed by Mark Halperin, a onetime political journalist, who took to his YouTube show on Wednesday to say that he had been pitched a story about Trump that “could end” the former president’s campaign. Halperin’s supposed story never materialized, and maybe that’s to be expected: he would have been an odd choice for such a leak. After all, his own career was derailed during the #MeToo movement, when he was accused by five women of sexual misconduct and harassment – including groping of exactly the sort that Williams says Donald Trump subjected her to. He still felt comfortable shilling a possible sexual violence story anyway, despite his own history. Probably, he assumed no one would bring it up.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in Elections

      U.S. Study on Puberty Blockers Goes Unpublished Because of Politics, Doctor Says

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      The leader of the long-running study said that the drugs did not improve mental health in children with gender distress and that the finding might be weaponized by opponents of the care.An influential doctor and advocate of adolescent gender treatments said she had not published a long-awaited study of puberty-blocking drugs because of the charged American political environment.The doctor, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, began the study in 2015 as part of a broader, multimillion-dollar federal project on transgender youth. She and colleagues recruited 95 children from across the country and gave them puberty blockers, which stave off the permanent physical changes — like breasts or a deepening voice — that could exacerbate their gender distress, known as dysphoria.The researchers followed the children for two years to see if the treatments improved their mental health. An older Dutch study had found that puberty blockers improved well-being, results that inspired clinics around the world to regularly prescribe the medications as part of what is now called gender-affirming care.But the American trial did not find a similar trend, Dr. Olson-Kennedy said in a wide-ranging interview. Puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements, she said, most likely because the children were already doing well when the study began.“They’re in really good shape when they come in, and they’re in really good shape after two years,” said Dr. Olson-Kennedy, who runs the country’s largest youth gender clinic at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.That conclusion seemed to contradict an earlier description of the group, in which Dr. Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues noted that one quarter of the adolescents were depressed or suicidal before treatment.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gender is going to be a huge factor in this election. Here’s what the data shows | Celinda Lake and Cate Gormley

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      The election for president ends in under a month, and voters in states across the country have begun casting early ballots. As we face what is shaping up to be the third presidential election that will come down to just tens of thousands of votes across a handful of key states, female voters, their concerns, and their judgments of the candidates will be decisive in the election.Polling shows that the gender gap, which we have seen in every presidential election since 1980, is at a record high. The gender gap, defined as the difference between the vote margin among women and the vote margin among men between Democrats and Republicans, is the key to success for Kamala Harris and other Democrats – they need to win women by more than they lose men.Recent polling varies, but these polls all demonstrate a significant gender gap. A Quinnipiac University poll from September shows a 26-point gender gap: women favor Harris 53% to 41% for Donald Trump, a 12-point advantage, while men favor Trump 54% to 40% for a 14-point advantage. A Suffolk University poll from August of likely voters shows a 34-point gender gap, with women supporting Harris 57% to 36% for Trump for a 21-point margin and men supporting Trump 51% to 38% for Harris for a 13-point margin. And an Echelon Insights poll in September also found a 10-point gender gap, with women favoring Harris 54% to 43% for Trump for an 11-point advantage and men 49% for Harris and 48% for Trump.Women and men are making different calculations as they plan to vote, and what drives these intentions are their most important issues and their perceptions of the candidates. Since the US supreme court ruled that states can ban abortion, abortion has been a top voting issue for female voters, especially younger women. In swing state polling conducted by the New York Times/Siena College in August, the economy and inflation are men’s most important issue in deciding their vote. For women, abortion and the economy and inflation are tied as the most important issues, and for women under age 45, abortion is the single most important voting issue.In a poll we conducted this spring on behalf of Intersections of Our Lives, a reproductive justice collaborative, we found that Black, Latina/x, and Asian American and Pacific Islander female voters think it is important for Congress to address every reproductive health and abortion issue we tested. Women of color have an expansive reproductive health agenda that includes addressing high rates of maternal mortality among women of color; ensuring access to birth control; ensuring that abortion is legal, affordable and accessible; ensuring that medication abortion is available to all women no matter where they live; and protecting IVF and other fertility treatments.In a survey of unmarried women under age 55 that we conducted for PSG Consulting and Innovating for the Public Good, we found that younger unmarried women are worried about losing basic rights and freedoms like access to reproductive health care, and they believe that this issue is more likely to be addressed if Democrats control Congress and the White House.Abortion is a major issue this election, and abortion and a female candidate on the ticket can mobilize women. According to an analysis by TargetSmart, we already see this mobilization. Since 21 July, when Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection, 38 states have updated voter files; voter registration has almost tripled among Black women ages 18-29 and almost doubled among all Black women, and increased 150% among Latina women ages 18-29, relative to the same period in 2020. Democratic registration has increased over 50% compared to 7% for Republicans.It is not just their concerns – female voters see Harris and Trump differently. Earlier this year, a New York Times/Siena College poll found that only 31% of women thought that Trump respects women “a lot” or “some”. In another recent Quinnipiac University poll, in August, women’s impressions of Harris and Trump diverged significantly. While 58% of women say that Harris is ethical, 64% say Trump is not ethical. Six in 10 (60%) women say Harris cares about the needs and problems of people like them, and 60% say that Trump does not care. A solid majority (57%) say Harris has good leadership skills and 54% say Trump does not. Finally, and maybe most importantly, 69% of women say Harris has the mental fitness to serve a presidential term, and 57% say Trump does not.As Eleanor Roosevelt said long ago: it’s up to the women.

      Celinda Lake is the president of Lake Research Partners

      Cate Gormley is the vice-president of Lake Research Partners More